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In the Shadow of Mt. TBR

This is the last Sunday Salon of 2009, and it’s got me thinking about how things has gone this year, as well as what I want to do next year. For one thing, in looking back at all the books I’ve read this year (76 as of right now), it seems like it’s been a LOOOONG year, lol. AND I started the year late, finishing my first book, Bedlam, Bath and Beyond by J.D. Warren on February 10. I also took a detour into the land of Azeroth, discovering the world of MMORPG (the acronym for “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game”) when I decided to check out what all the WoW fuss was. And while I still enjoy playing, I’ve gotten over it as such an obsessive distraction. Recently, a friend of mine tried to get me into another game like World of Warcraft (or WoW is like it, since it was first) called Guild Wars, but I didn’t really dig it. I also gave Warhammer a try, and was unimpressed by it, as well. Books just beat any other medium of escape!

For the most part, I’ve enjoyed the books I’ve read this year and it’s hard to pick favorites. But I shall try! The following are my stars of 2009 (in no particular order):

1. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak ~ My all-time favorite book, I fell in love with the story and Zusak’s writing style. I hope to give his other books a read as well someday. After finishing this book, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t start another book for awhile. I still find myself thinking about the beauty of the writing, the characters, and I want to reread it sometime soon.

2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury ~ First off, I love dystopic books, it’s probably my favorite genre. My definition of dystopia is: Someone’s Utopia is another’s HELL. I’ve been thinking a lot about this book lately, as I look at pictures I’ve taken of my 16-year-old this year. In every one she’s got her mp3 player going in her ears. At one point in time this year, all four of us were sitting in the same room, all of us listening to our own little soundtracks of our own lives. We were all in huggable difference, and yet we were in different universes. All I could think about were the seashells that Montag’s wife wore in her ears. It was a disturbing and surreal moment.

3. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen ~ This book was vivid and well-researched, and it made me feel the magic of going to a circus as a child for the first time. It had intrigue, romance, and the Great Depression. The moving back and forth from the present Jacob Jankowski (who was 92, or 93, or 94.. he couldn’t even remember anymore) to the young Jacob who walked away from his vet finals after the death of his parents, becoming the vet for the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.

4. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen ~ I recently finished this one, but in my rush to reach my goal of 75 books I’ve put off writing a review. Hopefully I’ll get to it this coming week, but it’ll probably not happened until after the kids get back to school in the new year. Northanger Abbey is my FAVORITE Austen book. It’s witty and fun and Austen uses it as a great vehicle for arguing the criticisms of her day. Reading this book was like watching myself as a teen. I was soOOo Catherine Morland! Dreamy, romantic who read way too many books and had no grasp of how the real world worked.

5. Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper ~ Probably the book with the longest full title I’ve read: Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, Or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat. This is my pimping-book for the year, meaning it’s the book I’ve been telling EVERYONE I see to read. In addition to mad reco’s, I gave away copies as Christmas presents. It’s such an inspirational and heart-warming story that I just can’t stop talking about it. I know I’ll reread this one again and again 🙂

So, what are my plans for the New Year? Well… I don’t really want to say I’ve made RESOLUTIONS because they never really work. I’ve been thinking in terms of REALIGNMENTS. I’ve gotten a bit lazy or distracted about things and have gone a bit off mark from where I wanted to go at the beginning of this year. So, here’s what I’m wanting to do as we begin 2010:

1. Um… I really need to do some house cleaning. Bad. I keep waiting for Miss Niecy to show up, lol, but I don’t think she’s coming. Honestly, with all my online game-playing (WoW and facebook games being the main offenders) in the last few months, the laundry has piled up as have the dishes, and it’s starting to look like we have a dirt floor in the kitchen. So, that’s first on my list of what I need to get done.

2. I need to get back to cooking dinners. Again, I’ve been lazy about not wanting to stop playing the games, and Domino’s has become #1 on my speed dial. My kids are probably the only ones in the world that have said “Please, no more pizza! I’m sick of pizza!” And no, frozen dinners don’t count as “cooking more”… lol.

3. Get back to blogging regularly. I’ve been bad about writing meme posts (which I enjoy) and writing reviews (which is sometimes a bit of work, but I also enjoy), mostly because *cough* it’d require me to get off the game and write them. Yeah… like I said, I’ve been bad about the games here lately.

4. Try to take things in balance. I have a bad habit of going “all one thing at the expense of everything else”. When I’m reading, that’s all I’m doing. That’s how I’ve managed to read almost 20 books in a little over a month. It’s pretty much all I’ve done. When I was playing WoW, that was all I did, too. All day, every day… sometimes for more than 24 hours straight. I just don’t seem to know how to do moderation.

5. Get through all my ARC-alanche pile. Period. Some of them have been on this pile for almost 2 years now. I still have Stealing Athena, The Aviary Gate, Zoe’s Tale, and The Good Thief on it. SOME are now available in AUDIOBOOK FORM. I really need to focus on getting these books done. I have FIVE LibraryThing Early Reader books to read, including Any Given Doomsday which I received back in February.

So, how about you? Any resolutions? What do you hope to do in the year to come?

Mags and I love watching Style Network’s Clean House (the ones with Niecy Nash… not the other lady) and we love to veg in my bed together and watch marathons of the show. Miss Niecy is lovely and hilarious, and after a few shows we can’t help but walk around doing Miss Niecy impressions… lol. But, of course, it’s never as good as the original 😉

Yay!!! Spring Break is here and two of my three lovelies have flown away to daddy’s for the week. I still have Gwen, but without Maggie to fight with she’s rather tame. She’s made plans to have sleep-over parties with her friends this week, too, so it’s going to quiet this week.

Our library will be having several movie events this week, including Twilight, which never did show at our theater. I’ll have to take Gwen to it and do some other special things with her since she so rarely has me to herself. She’s the middle child, so she’s often waiting on the side for her turn. She always enjoys vacation times when the other two are gone.

I finished reading The Book Thief on Tuesday, but my brain has yet to put it down. My mind wanders back to it often, even while reading one of the five books I’m currently working on. It’s now my favorite book, and I highly recommend anyone who hasn’t read it yet to do so. It’s a beautifully written and haunting tale. 🙂

I’ve finally gotten around to picking up the sixth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and am almost halfway through it. It’s fun and okay, but somewhere along the way I’ve lost the wonder for the series I once had. It’s the same book over and over again. Harry knows some deep dark truth and no one believes him. Even his best friends think he’s off his nuttter. Then a horrible thing happens that proves Harry was right all along. Sorries are said, forgiveness given, and everyone leaves Hogwarts with smiles and looking forward to next year…. when they’ll repeat the cycle all over again. Add to all that pimples and crushes and love potions, and you get the gist of HP and the HBP. Meh. The Goblet of Fire has been my favorite so far.

I stopped into the Catholic thrift store here in town to check out their books and left with Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus. It’s okay, and the thought occurred to me while reading it, “Would Marlowe have been more widely known if Shakespeare’s plays were never wrote down?” It’s an interesting thought, and makes me wonder about authors today.

What modern authors would be read more but for the mega-star writers like Patterson, Clancy, Grisham, King, and more?